The cost of the Bailout so far? How about $2.5 trillion..!

Bailout Sleuth:

By Chris Carey on November 10, 2008 6:50 PM

Although the price tag on the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program is $700 billion, the full amount that the government has invested in its rescue effort for struggling financial institutions appears to be closer to $2.5 trillion.

Bloomberg L.P., the parent company of Bloomberg News, said last week that it filed a lawsuit seeking information on the collateral that a group of banks pledged for some $2 trillion in emergency loans from the Federal Reserve.

Bloomberg asked a federal court in New York to require the Federal Reserve to disclose the identity of the banks that borrowed money through certain financing mechanisms, and to disclose what assets they pledged against those loans.

Bloomberg filed the suit after the Federal Reserve said that it would deny Bloomberg's request for the information under the Freedom of Information Act.

The financial firms that were eligible for some of the loans through the Federal Reserve included many of the same firms that split $125 billion in the first round of the Treasury Department's relief program.

The Treasury Department has approved more than $170 billion in capital injections for banks that applied to sell preferred stock to the government. It has about $80 billion remaining for additional participants, who must submit their applications by Friday.

The Treasury Department announced Monday that it also is investing $40 billion in the preferred shares of American International Group Inc. The financing it part of a new plan to salvage an earlier rescue plan that was going awry.

The revised plan brings the total assistance that AIG has received from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department to $150 billion.

Bloomberg reported that the Federal Reserve made its $2 trillion in emergency loans under 11 different programs, eight of which were created in the past 15 months.

The Treasury Department also made a little-noticed change to tax policy that experts say could save banks that merge with other banks as much as $140 billion in taxes. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the change would be Wells Fargo & Co., which is absorbing Wachovia Corp. in a deal spurred by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s concerns about Wachovia's solvency. According to an article Sunday in the Washington Post, Wells Fargo stands to save about $25 billion in taxes.

Adding together the $170 billion that the Treasury Department has currently agreed to provide banks in additional capital, the $150 billion that the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are providing to AIG and the $2 trillion that the Federal Reserve has provided banks in emergency loans brings the total assistance to $2.32 trillion.

If the estimated savings from the new tax breaks are included, the assistance would climb to $2.46 trillion. That total does not include other measures not focused directly on banks, such as Treasury Department's $200 billion in support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing the Administration's $300 billion HOPE for Homeowners program.

A great primer on Derivatives from Sepetmber 30

Fortune magazine via money.cnn.com via Elaine Supkis:

The $55 trillion dollar question

The financial crisis has put a spotlight on the obscure world of credit default swaps - which trade in a vast, unregulated market that most people haven't heard of and even fewer understand. Will this be the next disaster?

By Nicholas Varchaver, senior editor and Katie Benner, writer-reporter

Last Updated: September 30, 2008: 12:28 PM ET

(Fortune Magazine) -- As Congress wrestles with another bailout bill to try to contain the financial contagion, there's a potential killer bug out there whose next movement can't be predicted: the Credit Default Swap.

In just over a decade these privately traded derivatives contracts have ballooned from nothing into a $54.6 trillion market. CDS are the fastest-growing major type of financial derivatives. More important, they've played a critical role in the unfolding financial crisis. First, by ostensibly providing "insurance" on risky mortgage bonds, they encouraged and enabled reckless behavior during the housing bubble.

"If CDS had been taken out of play, companies would've said, 'I can't get this [risk] off my books,'" says Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor and former director of trading and markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "If they couldn't keep passing the risk down the line, those guys would've been stopped in their tracks. The ultimate assurance for issuing all this stuff was, 'It's insured.'"

Second, terror at the potential for a financial Ebola virus radiating out from a failing institution and infecting dozens or hundreds of other companies - all linked to one another by CDS and other instruments - was a major reason that regulators stepped in to bail out Bear Stearns and buy out AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), whose calamitous descent itself was triggered by losses on its CDS contracts (see "Hank's Last Stand").

And the fear of a CDS catastrophe still haunts the markets. For starters, nobody knows how federal intervention might ripple through this chain of contracts. And meanwhile, as we'll see, two fundamental aspects of the CDS market - that it is unregulated, and that almost nothing is disclosed publicly - may be about to change. That adds even more uncertainty to the equation.

"The big problem is that here are all these public companies - banks and corporations - and no one really knows what exposure they've got from the CDS contracts," says Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and former Morgan Stanley derivatives salesman who has been writing about the dangers of CDS and their ilk for a decade. "The really scary part is that we don't have a clue." Chris Wolf, a co-manager of Cogo Wolf, a hedge fund of funds, compares them to one of the great mysteries of astrophysics: "This has become essentially the dark matter of the financial universe."

***

AT FIRST GLANCE, credit default swaps don't look all that scary. A CDS is just a contract: The "buyer" plunks down something that resembles a premium, and the "seller" agrees to make a specific payment if a particular event, such as a bond default, occurs. Used soberly, CDS offer concrete benefits: If you're holding bonds and you're worried that the issuer won't be able to pay, buying CDS should cover your loss. "CDS serve a very useful function of allowing financial markets to efficiently transfer credit risk," argues Sunil Hirani, the CEO of Creditex, one of a handful of marketplaces that trade the contracts.

Because they're contracts rather than securities or insurance, CDS are easy to create: Often deals are done in a one-minute phone conversation or an instant message. Many technical aspects of CDS, such as the typical five-year term, have been standardized by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA). That only accelerates the process. You strike your deal, fill out some forms, and you've got yourself a $5 million - or a $100 million - contract.

And as long as someone is willing to take the other side of the proposition, a CDS can cover just about anything, making it the Wall Street equivalent of those notorious Lloyds of London policies covering Liberace's hands and other esoterica. It has even become possible to purchase a CDS that would pay out if the U.S. government defaults. (Trust us when we say that if the government goes under, trying to collect will be the least of your worries.)

You can guess how Wall Street cowboys responded to the opportunity to make deals that (1) can be struck in a minute, (2) require little or no cash upfront, and (3) can cover anything. Yee-haw! You can almost picture Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove climbing onto the H-bomb before it's released from the B-52. And indeed, the volume of CDS has exploded with nuclear force, nearly doubling every year since 2001 to reach a recent peak of $62 trillion at the end of 2007, before receding to $54.6 trillion as of June 30, according to ISDA.

Take that gargantuan number with a grain of salt. It refers to the face value of all outstanding contracts. But many players in the market hold offsetting positions. So if, in theory, every entity that owns CDS had to settle its contracts tomorrow and "netted" all its positions against each other, a much smaller amount of money would change hands. But even a tiny fraction of that $54.6 trillion would still be a daunting sum.

The credit freeze and then the Bear disaster explain the drop in outstanding CDS contracts during the first half of the year - and the market has only worsened since. CDS contracts on widely held debt, such as General Motors' (GM, Fortune 500), continue to be actively bought and sold. But traders say almost no new contracts are being written on any but the most liquid debt issues right now, in part because nobody wants to put money at risk and because nobody knows what Washington will do and how that will affect the market. ("There's nothing to do but watch Bernanke on TV," one trader told Fortune during the week when the Fed chairman was going before Congress to push the mortgage bailout.) So, after nearly a decade of exponential growth, the CDS market is poised for its first sustained contraction.

***

ONE REASON THE MARKET TOOK OFF is that you don't have to own a bond to buy a CDS on it - anyone can place a bet on whether a bond will fail. Indeed the majority of CDS now consists of bets on other people's debt. That's why it's possible for the market to be so big: The $54.6 trillion in CDS contracts completely dwarfs total corporate debt, which the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association puts at $6.2 trillion, and the $10 trillion it counts in all forms of asset-backed debt.

"It's sort of like I think you're a bad driver and you're going to crash your car," says Greenberger, formerly of the CFTC. "So I go to an insurance company and get collision insurance on your car because I think it'll crash and I'll collect on it." That's precisely what the biggest winners in the subprime debacle did. Hedge fund star John Paulson of Paulson & Co., for example, made $15 billion in 2007, largely by using CDS to bet that other investors' subprime mortgage bonds would default.

So what started out as a vehicle for hedging ended up giving investors a cheap, easy way to wager on almost any event in the credit markets. In effect, credit default swaps became the world's largest casino. As Christopher Whalen, a managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, observes, "To be generous, you could call it an unregulated, uncapitalized insurance market. But really, you would call it a gaming contract."

There is at least one key difference between casino gambling and CDS trading: Gambling has strict government regulation. The federal government has long shied away from any oversight of CDS. The CFTC floated the idea of taking an oversight role in the late '90s, only to find itself opposed by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others. Then, in 2000, Congress, with the support of Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, passed a bill prohibiting all federal and most state regulation of CDS and other derivatives. In a press release at the time, co-sponsor Senator Phil Gramm - most recently in the news when he stepped down as John McCain's campaign co-chair this summer after calling people who talk about a recession "whiners" - crowed that the new law "protects financial institutions from over-regulation ... and it guarantees that the United States will maintain its global dominance of financial markets." (The authors of the legislation were so bent on warding off regulation that they had the bill specify that it would "supersede and preempt the application of any state or local law that prohibits gaming ...") Not everyone was as sanguine as Gramm. In 2003 Warren Buffett famously called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction."

***

THERE'S ANOTHER BIG difference between trading CDS and casino gambling. When you put $10 on black 22, you're pretty sure the casino will pay off if you win. The CDS market offers no such assurance. One reason the market grew so quickly was that hedge funds poured in, sensing easy money. And not just big, well-established hedge funds but a lot of upstarts. So in some cases, giant financial institutions were counting on collecting money from institutions only slightly more solvent than your average minimart. The danger, of course, is that if a hedge fund suddenly has to pay off on a lot of CDS, it will simply go out of business. "People have been insuring risks that they can't insure," says Peter Schiff, the president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of Crash Proof, which predicted doom for Fannie and Freddie, among other things. "Let's say you're writing fire insurance policies, and every time you get the [premium], you spend it. You just assume that no houses are going to burn down. And all of a sudden there's a huge fire and they all burn down. What do you do? You just close up shop."

This is not an academic concern. Wachovia (WB, Fortune 500) and Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) are wrangling in court with a $50 million hedge fund located in the Channel Islands. The reason: A dispute over two $10 million credit default swaps covering some CDOs. The specifics of the spat aren't important. What's most revealing is that these massive banks put their faith in a Lilliputian fund (in an inaccessible jurisdiction) that was risking 40% of its capital for just two CDS. Can anyone imagine that Citi would, say, insure its headquarters building with a thinly capitalized, unregulated, offshore entity?

That's one element of what's known as "counterparty risk." Here's another: In many cases, you don't even know who has the other side of your bet. Parties to the contract can, and do, transfer their side of the contract to third parties. Investment firms assert that transfers are well documented (a claim that, like most in the world of CDS, is impossible to verify). But even if that's true, you're still left with the fact that a given company's risks are being dispersed in ways that they may not know about and can't control.

It doesn't help that CDS trading is a haphazard process. Most contracts are bought and sold over the phone or by instant message and settled manually. Settlement has been sloppy, confirms Jamie Cawley of IDX Capital, a firm that brokers trades between big banks. Pushed by New York Fed president Timothy Geithner, the players have been improving the process. But even as recently as a year ago, Cawley says, so many trades were sitting around unfulfilled that "there were $1 trillion worth of swaps that were unsettled among counterparties."

Trade settlement is not the only anachronistic aspect of CDS trading. Consider what will happen with CDS contracts relating to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two were placed in conservatorship on Sept. 7. But the value of many contracts won't be determined till Oct. 6, when an auction will set a cash price for Fannie and Freddie bonds. We'll spare you the technical reasons, but suffice it to ask: Can you imagine any other major market that would need a month to resolve something like this?

***

WITH WASHINGTON SUDDENLY in a frenzy of outrage over the financial markets, debating everything from the shape and extent of the mortgage plan to what should be done about short-selling, the future for CDS is very blurry. "The market is here to stay," asserts Cawley. The question is simply: What sorts of changes are in store? As this article was going to press, SEC chairman Christopher Cox asked the Senate to allow his agency to begin regulating CDS - mostly, it should be said, to rein in short-selling. And the SEC separately announced that it was expanding its investigation of market manipulation, which initially targeted the short-sellers, to CDS investors.

Under other circumstances, Cox's request might have been met with polite silence. But the convulsions over the mortgage bailout are so dramatic that they are reminiscent of the moment, soon after the Enron scandal, when Congress drafted the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. The desire to blame short-sellers may actually result in powers for Cox that, until very recently, he showed no signs of wanting. Should legislators wade into this issue, the measures most widely seen as necessary are straightforward: some form of centralized trading or clearing and some form of capital or reserve requirements. Meanwhile, New York State's insurance commissioner, Eric Dinallo, announced new regulations that would essentially treat sellers of some (but not all) CDS as insurance entities, thereby forcing them to set aside reserves and otherwise follow state insurance law - requirements that would probably drive many participants from the market. Whether CDS players will find a way to challenge the rules remains to be seen. (ISDA, the industry's trade group, has already gone on record in opposition to Cox's proposal.) If nothing else, the New York law may provide additional impetus for the feds to take action.

For now, the biggest impact could come from the Financial Accounting Standards Board. It is implementing a new rule in November that will require sellers of CDS and other credit derivatives to report detailed information, including their maximum payouts and reasons for entering the contracts, as well as assets that might allow them to offset any payouts. Anybody who has tried to parse CEO compensation in recent years knows that more disclosure doesn't guarantee clarity, but any increase in information in the CDS realm will be a benefit. Perhaps that would limit the baleful effect of CDS on (must we consider it?) the next disaster - or even help us prevent it.

First Published: September 30, 2008: 11:34 AM ET

Derivatives—what the heck are deriviatives?

Here is the most simple explanation of derivatives I've found. Apparently others have also thought so, since I've seen this link in several places.

Keep in mind that this is written by someone who wants to convince you to follow his "Turning in flation into wealth" program.

Nonetheless, it actually made the whole mess sound logical and, in an unregulated economic environment, relatively inevitable.

A tiny part of the beginning of it, worth seeing simply because of the great graphic:

Daniel R. Amerman, CFA, InflationIntoWealth.com

The Rapid & Dangerous Collapse of AIG

“The particular risks that brought the company (AIG) to the brink of bankruptcy seem to lie not with its core insurance businesses but with its derivatives-trading subsidiary AIG Financial Products. AIG FP, as it's called, merits a mere paragraph in the nine-page description of the company's businesses in its most recent annual report. But it's a huge player in the new and mysterious business of credit-default swaps: derivative securities that allow banks, hedge funds and other financial players to insure against loans gone bad.”

Time, September 17, 2008

On September 1^st, few knew that AIG, the largest insurance company in the world with over $1 trillion in assets, was in deep trouble. By September 12^th, the rumors about major trouble were everywhere. By September 15^th AIG’s corporate life expectancy was being measured in days, and the question was: bankruptcy, buyer or bailout? By the evening of September 16^th, the federal government had massively intervened, making an $85 billion loan to AIG in exchange for a controlling 79.9% equity share of the company.

Welcome to the brave new world of credit derivatives driven collapses. A world that is far more dangerous than the world of subprime mortgage derivatives. A complex world that because of its sheer size can potentially cause more damage in a matter of days than the subprime mortgage derivatives caused in their first year in the headlines. The chart below shows the relative size of the credit derivatives and subprime mortgage markets.

How great is the real danger? The bulk of the remainder of this article explains the extent of the danger. With a few market changes, this is the credit derivatives primer as published on May 2^nd of 2008. There is also new material at the end of the article, talking about what could be anticipated, and introducing some solutions.

Chris Floyd explains the irony of finding all that money that could have been used to rebuild the country, just in time to bail out the rich

Chris Floyd: Creative Destruction: The Solid Core Behind the Financial Crisis

Fed’s $85 Billion Loan Rescues Insurer (NY Times)

The bailout [of American International Group]... effectively puts taxpayer money at risk while protecting bad investments made by A.I.G. and other institutions it does business with.

Do you get it now? The rich and powerful spend years making foolish deals in a market they rigged with the connivance of utterly corrupted politicians on both sides the aisle; their fraudulent scheme finally collapses, exposing them to some of the most horrific financial losses in history....and YOU will have to pay for it. For generations. Not only directly, with the tax money straight from your pocket, but even more so in the further degradation of national life: infrastructure, services, programs, amenities that will be starved or abandoned as even more of the government's money is poured out to shield the wastrel elite from suffering the consequences of their own rapacious folly.

And with all the talk of a "new Cold War," who knew that it would be Washington and Wall Street, not the Kremlin, who resurrected socialism in the 21st century, in what the Times called "the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank’s history"? Socialism for the rich only, to be sure. Ole Joe "Bankruptcy Bill" Biden and his bipartisan cohorts in Congress have long made sure that any ordinary citizen -- especially the old, the sick, the poor, the most desperate -- will be squeezed to the last drop to pay off their debts, even if these were incurred through illness or misfortune. But for our boardroom Bolsheviki, the state is always there, to cushion and to coddle.

And who knew there was so much money in the federal coffers? Endless, roaring torrents of money available for the ever-expanding operations of the global Terror War (up to $3 trillion for the rape of Iraq alone), and all of this on top of an ever-expanding "regular" military budget that tops half-a-trillion dollars each and every year. And now tens of billions for Bear-Sterns, Fannie Mae, Fannie Mac, A.I.G. and the next fat-cattery to go under. Gosh, you mean all that cash was just lying around under the federal mattress all along?

You mean we could have used some of it for, say, building schools and hospitals, or national health insurance, or rebuilding our globalization-gutted cities, or drug rehab programs, or caring for our elderly, or helping people start businesses, or repairing our rotted infrastructure, or supporting the arts and sciences, or building parks and other "common pleasures, to walk abroad and recreate yourselves"? You mean there has been enough money there all along to help create a more just, equitable, enjoyable and civilized society? Don't that beat all?

[, , ,]

Arthur Silber: the Vampire, Struck by Sunlight
[. . .]
Whatcha gonna do? Not a goddamned thing. Vote for McCain! Vote for Obama! It doesn't matter. The ruling class wins either way. The ruling class always wins. That's how the system was designed, and that's how it works. For the ruling class, it works very admirably.

That last observation by Silber is perhaps the most telling, and frightening of all: despite all the disasters raging around us -- the wars, the atrocities, the tyranny, the economic collapse -- the system is working. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do: serve the rich and powerful, guard and protect them, entrench them in their rule. Just like John McCain says, the system is fundamentally sound.

P.S. And for those who believe that the current conniption somehow presages the collapse of the American empire, please note that the sound system of elite service described above is backed up by the most powerful military machine in the history of the world (including a nuclear arsenal that can obliterate any nation at any time), directed by a militarized state that has never shown the slightest hesitation in using violent force against its own people should they step too far out of line. It's not going to collapse overnight because of a well-cushioned crash on Wall Street or a few botched wars. It still has many miles to go – and much blood yet to spill – before it faces the inevitable axe of history.

And who or what exactly is AIG?

LA Times (Sept 22, 2000):

The Secret (Insurance) Agent Men

By Mark Fritz
September 22, 2000 in print edition A-1

They knew which factories to burn, which bridges to blow up, which cargo ships could be sunk in good conscience. They had pothole counts for roads used for invasion and head counts for city blocks marked for incineration.

They weren’t just secret agents. They were secret insurance agents. These undercover underwriters gave their World War II spymasters access to a global industry that both bankrolled and, ultimately, helped bring down Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2.

Though rarely numbering more than a half dozen agents, the unit gathered intelligence on the enemy’s insurance industry, Nazi insurance titans and suspected collaborators in the insurance business. But, more significantly, the unit mined standard insurance records for blueprints of bomb plants, timetables of tide changes and thousands of other details about targets, from a brewery in Bangkok to a candy company in Bergedorf.

“They used insurance information as a weapon of war,” said Greg Bradsher, a historian and National Archives expert on the declassified records.
[. . .]

Mike Rupert, from a very very long article about AIG on August 14, 2001 (via Cryptogon.com):

[. . .]

The whole purpose of From The Wilderness is to teach the world that it is a specific intent of Wall Street and the U.S. government to give authoritative permission and approval to the drug trade to ensure that drug profits -- the money -- comes back under the control of the people who sanctioned the trade to begin with.

[. . .]

AIG Highlights

• AIG has the largest market capitalization (total value of all shares) of any insurance or financial services organization on the NYSE -- $198.4 billion in 2000. It has operations in 130 countries.
• Ranked #7 on Forbes Super 100 list of companies. After GE, Citigroup, BankAmerica, Exxon, IBM and Ford.
• The largest U.S. underwriter of commercial and industrial insurance.
• Operates AIG Financial Services Group, which sells investments, international asset management and "advisory" services.
• The largest seller of retirement annuities in the U.S. through its acquisitions of SunAmerica and American General in 1999 and 2001 respectively.
• AIG is licensed to operate banks in three countries, including the US (1999) and also issues credit cards.

History

• Originally formed as the Asia Life/C. V. Starr Companies in the 1930s by founder Cornelius Starr who served with the OSS during World War II. The Starr corporation shared the same office building as OSS headquarters in New York, and functioned as an intelligence conduit on shipping, manufacturing and industrial bombing targets in Asia and Germany throughout WW II. [The Los Angeles Times, Sept. 22, 2000]
• Early business centered primarily in China and Asia. Starr interests centered in Asia and Panama.
• 1951 - Changed name to American Life Insurance Company (ALICO).
• Acquired major U.S. insurance companies in the 1950s and 60s.
• 1967 - Incorporated as American International Group (AIG).
• 1969 - First public offering.
• First western insurance company to create joint ventures with Hungary, Poland and Romania in the 1960s.
• In 1980 established joint venture with the People's Insurance Company of China.
• First insurance company licensed to do business on its own in Japan (1952), Mainland China (1990), and Vietnam (2000).
• Member and staunch supporter of the World Trade Organization. During 1997 WTO negotiations, AIG collaborated directly with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to negotiate Asian financial, investment and trade agreements covering 102 countries, which one report described as bullying and marked by "messages back and forth from Geneva to Washington, and� reports, between the US Treasury and American International Group." [Third World Economics, No. 175, 16-31, 12/97].
• During the 1990s involved with U.S. investment in Russia (overseen by Goldman Sachs and The Harvard Endowment) through Brunswick Brokerage. Secured a $300 million OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation) guarantee for a Russian investment fund. [Paul Likoudis, Editor, The Wanderer.]
• AIG has "joint venture" interests in Latin America through ZonaFinanciera with Citibank which in May 2001 purchased Mexico's Banamex and will be placing reported drug money launderer and trafficker Roberto Hernandez on its board of directors.
• AIG insures more than half of the major US airports.
• The world's "market leader" in leasing and remarketing of advanced technology commercial jet aircraft - "the most modern fleet of aircraft in the world. " With 2000 revenues of $2.44 billion AIG owns a fleet of 494 jets, 89 of which it "manages" itself. Clients include airlines in U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America where, in 2000, it leased, "additional aircraft to a number of established customers."

Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, 75 -- Chairman and CEO of American International Group (AIG)

• WWII, Served with US Army Signal Corps and Army Rangers
• LL.B., New York Law School, 1950
• Korean War, Investigated reported massacres at POW camps run by UN/US personnel
• Elected AIG President in 1962, CEO in 1967 and Chairman in 1989.
• Former Chairman and Director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
• Forbes 111^th richest man in the world (More than $4 billion net worth)
• Vice Chairman, Council on Foreign Relations
• Vice Chairman, Center for Strategic and International Studies
• Member, Board of Directors, New York Stock Exchange
• Member, Trilateral Commission
• Member, The Bilderberger Group
• Chairman, The Nixon Center
• Chairman, U.S.-China Business Council
• Chairman, The Starr Foundation
• Accompanied President George Bush on his trade mission to China in 1992
• Major contributor to The Heritage Foundation
• Name floated by Senator Arlen Specter to become CIA director in 1995 (Reported in U.S. News and World Report - 2/20/95)